So Anonymous is claiming that they have infiltrated the US military now and is threatening more leaks like Manning and Snowden.
And people laughed at me the other day when I saw the Bronies patch in the US Air Force, and I tweeted, oh, no, 4chan is in the military now.
How do I know that? Because like a lot of things, I saw it first in Second Life more than a year ago. The Woodbury University/4chan characters, after they were perma-banned yet again and had their servers confiscated for violating the TOS and harassing others and crashing sims, re-spawned as members of the Bronies fan club and then took it over, then used that cover to grief some more.
I thought that the news that the Bronies were overtaken by 4chan was common knowledge as it spread further around the web. Guess not in the Air Force, as they didn't stamp it out but instead indulged it -- and of course the meme is perfect for just that very thing, oh, waaaa how can you b& our pwecious pwnies they're so cute. Then look who is pwned in the end.
I got into a debate about this with one of those anonymous people on Twitter with a female avatar who distinctly feels like a male and who knows lots about coding and the armed forces, maybe somebody who is former or current military, maybe put on there as a persona to vacuum up chat and ID links or incite discussion, who knows. There are so many of those types. This person first denied there could be any 4chan relationship, I sent the links and then they simply didn't care. It didn't matter. Anonymous culture didn't bother them. Because they were already part of that culture in some way as you can see from their TL.
This persona pointed out to me that MIL uses hackers -- MIL being the Internet domain name for the military of course. This is something I've always frowned on -- they're asking for a peck of trouble with that one, in my book. Haven't they been taught anything by Manning and Snowden? And others we haven't heard about? There were these weepy articles after Snowden's defection to Moscow about how it would be harder for hackers now to work with the NSA because they wouldn't trust it.
Huh? Could the little darlings in fact not be trusted by NSA in the first place?!
I pointed out that MIL made Tor, Tor brought headaches now (WikiLeaks, Anonymous mayhem, not to mention nests of child pornographers!), what, no regrets?
"Of course regrets," tweets the character. "Of course there will always be those."
Snerk. Like lyrics in the Frank Sinatra song, "I Did it My Way" -- "regrets, I've had a few." Sigh.
While I think the situation is probably bad, I also think this Buzzfeed articles is mainly bluff and psywar, and I hardly expect BuzzFeed to tell the difference as they haven't dug terribly deep on this, preferring to get the page hits by publishing the sensational claims basically unexamined. It would have been nice to hear from some army officials, especially at the bases mentioned, about these claims.
But....it's not surprising given that the culture of the hacker has spread everywhere among cynical nihilist youth, and the armed forces have not done much to deter it or punish it. Maybe they think it helps create a fighting spirit, who knows.
There's also the problem of how geeks in and out of government or military service or private corporations are all part of the same tribe whose loyalty is to each other, not to the institutions where they serve.
Note that the Anonymous dude here makes the same claim they always do -- duplicitously -- that they are not a top-down organization, and the army thinks they are. But of course they are a top-down organization, escheloned, highly-disciplined through internal obedience and even terror, I've witnessed this many, many times -- recently when I was harassed around the Steubenville story. Remember how that awful story of my severe harassment ended, where I was doxed and intimidated with threatening videos on Youtube and sent messages that people were coming to my home, etc? Some higher-up -- some archangel -- disciplined those who had begun an operation to harass me called #OpCatzhunt or something like htat. Those people then themselves got the treatment of doxing (they are a nice bunch, these people). They were driven off Twitter. Their pages disappeared. Their operations disappeared. They became non-persons. This is not amusing.
What can you do about this? I used to joke that they would have to breed geeks from birth on a mountain somewhere to keep them from becoming tainted by hacker culture.
A problem with that is that with the enormous volume of knowledge -- rather, lore -- that needs to be known about how to work Internet technology, a lot of learning happens through peer-to-peer sharing, informal talks, socializing in chat rooms and so on -- learn as you do. I have seen even decent, Christian family men types who read the Bible be sabotaged by this culture when they immerse in it. You would have to devise some good innoculation to start; this begins by a fearless inventory of the phenomenon and not pretending there's anything "innovative" about it.
The open source culture in particular creates this environment of rapid collective learning that always creates then collectived nihilist minds -- and it becomes very hard to change the nature of the culture, because the culture has already been welded into the tools, and the tools keep replicating the culture. I can't over-emphasize this. Internet tools and codes and widgets are not neutral. They contain in them many ways of thinking, decision trees, modes (like being able to vote "yes" but not "no") and it is hard to undo this hardened culture already.
There's also these kind of beings online that have come into existence -- collectivized minds that function as little cells -- impervious, except when they aren't. This is hard to describe, but I'll try.
The first time I came across this phenomenon was in Second Life, maybe where it is easier to visualize. This was about eight or nine years ago. I landed on a sim, and found about 6 or 8 avatars doing various things -- perhaps blowing up stuff or putting objects on physics. It was a science fiction sim, I was just out exploring, and flying around.
These people had all been together a long time and finished each other's sentences. They were a collective. But more than a Soviet-style collective, which I've had lots of experience with. They were like a mind-meld. They would perform various roles simultaneously. Of course, it was easy for them, being like this, to immediately make a gang to heckle me. That's par for the course. But you could also see how inseparable these avatars were, how they spent all day online with each other.
It's hard to describe if you haven't seen it, but I would run across these cells all the time in Second Life, particularly the open-source sand-boxing nerds. For example, once I had some contest or something with a free month's rent. And these Anonymous types (at that time from 4chan and somethingawful.com) who had an anti-Scientology group long before the famous Anonymous real-life demonstrations against Scientology invaded this contest and won it, then swarmed ilke a hive over the property and built or created all kinds of nuisance grief stuff and devised ways to ridicule and heckle me. Again, there was that sense that these creatures finished each other's sentences and all reasoned as one. They could do this through not only the ability to create a closed group and text in it rapidly as a group, or IM each other, or use Jabber or even Yahoo outside of SL as a chat interface; they also had bunches of memes and phrases and inside jokes that created cohesion to their little subcultural unit. Anticultural unit, would be more like it. I think some of the anti-Scientology stuff was prototyped in SL (and I have no use for Scientology, more on that later).
So once these cells get created and stick together, I don't think anything -- army, government, even prison could break them up. Because they cohere not just in some one place like Second Life. They're also in dozens of other places. They might have a guild in World of Warcraft. They might have their IRC channel. They might all chat on Plurk even, although that's more of a girl thing. I see how much they swarm on Twitter and how much Twitter, sadly, has made this whole awful movement metast
So what could you do about this?
What could you do if you were the NSA or the army? I see the NSA was reducing 90% of their systems analysts and automating their work. That's funny -- solving the problem of the soul-less nihilists with no moral compasses by putting in robots to replace them? I think the problem is more about all these contractors and sub-contractors. They've got to go. There are too many of them. It is all too attenuated. Outsourcing tech is among the many poor decisions that cost Romney the elections. It's all too strained and there isn't quality control and discipline. There aren't loyal staff.
That won't be enough to fix the nihilism problem, but what can you do?
I hardly think that you could intern all the suspect geeks as the government did the Japanese people after Pearl Harbour! Even though Jimmy Carter apologized years later and providing $20,000 to each person as compensation, that's hardly enough, given the realities of what it means to intern classes of people on a mass basis like this, purely on ethnic or other grounds.
I can just see hacker internment camp though, can't you? They arrive with no change of their Goatse t-shirts and never shave their scraggly beards, and since they lack outdoor skills and they've been deprived of the Internet, they crouch on their bunks solving Sudoku puzzles and playing Dungeons and Dragons on paper while some of them desperately try to rig a ham radio out of car parts and tin cans. They are fed spam and government-issue peanut butter but their families are allowed to bring them Red Bull and Ring Dings on visits.
No, not a solution because I think it might involve jailing 7 million people, right? Isn't that how many people have jail-broken their phones?
A much more humane solution and of course far more effective than trying to strain the fish out of the sea of the Internet where they are interdependent is to have computer professional societies and Internet businesses like Google lead the way with ETHICS. To denounce the DdoS in any form for any reason. To condemn unauthorized use of other people's computers for any reason or no reason. To establish that you inform companies of vulnerabilities privately and help them patch them rather then hack them and publicize it. To establish that hacking secret government files is wrong and a crime, and that you lobby the government over policies you don't like peacefully.
But I don't expect either the societies or the companies to do a thing about ETHICS in this way -- they are ethics-free if not sinister in their malicious criminality themselves -- all the Big IT companies have a symbiosis feeding off the hacker open source culture for free R&D and free coding labour.
Recent Comments